Parent Resources

Vaccine Information

Effective 10/01/2015 our practice will no longer accept new patients/families that do not adhere to the standard immuniztion schedule. All of our providers follow the recommendations of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) for childhood vaccines to ensure the health and safety of your child.

In 1796, Edward Jenner inoculated an 8-year-old boy against smallpox and coined the term “vaccination” to describe what he had done.

Today, thanks to vaccination, there is no more smallpox, and routine vaccination against childhood diseases is an important part of our children’s health care.

As parents, we want to do everything we can to keep our children from getting sick. In this booklet you will learn more about the role vaccines play in keeping them healthy. You will learn about:

Diseases that are prevented by vaccines, and the vaccines that prevent them.

How to prepare for a doctor’s visit that includes vaccinations, and what to expect during and after the visit.

How vaccines help your child’s immune system do its job.

How well vaccines work, and how safe they are.

Where to find more information.

Cover design by Kyle Brooks

Your child’s vaccinations might be given by a doctor. They might also be given by a nurse, a nurse practitioner, a medical assistant, a physician’s assistant, or a pharmacist. The terms ‘health care provider’ or ‘provider’ also appear in this booklet. They can apply to anyone who gives a vaccination.

Revised 08/2015

Part One Vaccine-Preventable Diseases and Childhood Vaccines

Part One Vaccine-Preventable Diseases and Childhood Vaccines

Part 1: Vaccine-Preventable Diseases

and Childhood Vaccines

Most medicines are given to cure an illness or to relieve its symptoms.

Vaccines are different. They are given to prevent illness.

Vaccine-Preventable Diseases

Fourteen diseases can be prevented by routine childhood vaccines:

Diphtheria

• Caused by bacteria.

• Causes sore throat, fever, and chills.

• If not properly diagnosed and treated, it can produce a toxin that can

In other words, the first time you are exposed to a disease, your immune

system won’t stop you from getting sick, but it will help you recover and

make you immune to that disease if you are ever exposed to it again.

Immunity from Vaccines

With vaccination, killed or weakened disease germs are intentionally

introduced into the body, usually by injection. Then your immune system

goes to work, just as if you were exposed to a disease:

1. It recognizes the vaccine germs as not belonging in your body – as

being “foreign invaders.”

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Parent’s Guide to CHILDHOOD IMMUNIZATIONS

2. It responds by producing antibodies, the same as if you had been

exposed to the disease. But there is a difference. The germs in

the vaccine are weakened or killed, so they won’t make you

sick.

3. However, you will still develop immunity, just as if you had gotten

sick from the actual disease. So if germs from that disease ever do

try to infect you, your immune system will come to your defense and

stop them from making you sick.

In other words, getting a disease or getting a vaccine can both give you

future protection from that disease. The difference is that with the disease

you have to get sick to get that protection. With the vaccine you don’t.

How Safe Are Vaccines?

This is a question that naturally worries any new parent. No matter how

good vaccines are at preventing disease, no matter how much they have

reduced diseases over the years, no matter how many lives they have

saved, what if they can actually harm your baby?

Vaccine safety is a complex issue, and some specific questions will be

addressed in Part 4 (Frequently Asked Questions) of this booklet. In the

meantime, here are some basics:

Can vaccines harm my child? Any medicine can cause a reaction, even

aspirin. Vaccines are no exception.

Will vaccines harm my child? Probably not. Many children never have

a reaction to a vaccine. For those who do, most reactions will be minor . . .

a sore leg, a slight rash, or a mild fever that goes away in a day or two.

Some children have more serious reactions like a high fever, chills, fussiness,

or muscle aches. One of the scariest of these reactions is called a

febrile seizure. This is a seizure, or convulsion, caused by a high fever.

During a febrile seizure a child might shake uncontrollably, become

unresponsive, or even lose consciousness. About one child in 25 will

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Part Three More About Vaccines

have at least one febrile seizure, usually between 6 months and 3 years of

age. Any high fever, regardless of the cause, can trigger a febrile seizure,

including a fever associated with a vaccination. Febrile seizures look seri

ous, but fortunately they almost never are. Children recover with no last

ing effects. You can learn more about febrile seizures at

www.

ninds.nih.

gov/disorders/febrile_seizures/detail_febrile_seizures.htm.

Rarely, a child will have a truly serious reaction, like encephalopathy

(brain infection) or a severe allergic reaction. These are the scary possibilities

that make some parents think that it might actually be better not

to vaccinate their children.

Would it?

First, serious reactions are extremely rare. One of the most serious

– a life-threatening allergic reaction to a substance in a vaccine – occurs

only about once in every million vaccine doses.

There are about a million words in the 7-volume series of Harry

Potter books. If we let each of those words represent a dose of

vaccine, then one word, somewhere within the 7 books’ 4,224

pages, would represent the risk of a severe allergic reaction.

Second, sometimes it is hard to tell if a reaction was even caused by

a vaccine. Any serious reaction that could be caused by a vaccine could

also be caused by something else. There is no such thing as a serious

health problem that is caused only by vaccines. For something that affects

only one child in a hundred thousand or a million, it can be very hard to

isolate the cause.

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Parent’s Guide to CHILDHOOD IMMUNIZATIONS

Example: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is the unexplained,

sudden death of an infant, usually while sleeping. The

causes of SIDS have always been uncertain, and for a time, some

people blamed DTP* vaccine. As evidence, they pointed to the

fact that SIDS deaths often seemed to occur within several days

after a child received a dose of DTP vaccine.

But SIDS, by definition, occurs at the same ages when millions

of babies were getting multiple doses of DTP – so it would have

been remarkable if SIDS didn’t occasionally strike right after

the shot. Studies were conducted to test this theory, and it was

found that babies who had been vaccinated with DTP were no

more likely to get SIDS than babies who weren’t vaccinated –

in other words, there was no association. Since then, we have

learned that precautions such as putting babies to sleep on

their backs and not smoking around them can dramatically

reduce the risk of SIDS. (For more information about SIDS, see

the American SIDS Institute webpage at http://sids.org/.)

*DTP is an older version of DTaP.

Third, it isn’t just risks – it’s also benefits. True, there is a risk that a

dose of vaccine could cause discomfort and other side effects, and a very

small risk that it could cause a serious problem.

What do you get for taking that small risk?

Most importantly, your baby will be protected from more than a dozen

potentially serious diseases. (At this point you might be asking how

likely your child is to actually be exposed to one of these diseases if she

isn’t vaccinated? For a discussion of this question, see Part 4 [Frequently

Asked Questions].)

26

Meet Riley

In most ways, Riley is a typical 8-year-old girl. She takes piano and gymnastics lessons, plays soccer, likes to swim, and gets into fights with her brothers.

But Riley has something most 8-year olds don’t – another child’s heart. She was born with a serious heart defect and had to get a transplant within days of her birth.

Because Riley’s new heart doesn’t really belong to her, her body would reject it if she didn’t take special drugs. These drugs suppress her immune system, and because of this she can’t get live-virus vaccines like measles, mumps, rubella, or chickenpox.

Consequently, Riley is not immune to these diseases. She has to depend on the immunity of people around herfor protection. If one of her schoolmates or playmates were to come down with a case of measles or chickenpox, Riley could easily catch it from them. And because her immune system can’t fight off the infection, it could become very serious if not treated promptly.

Riley enjoys a normal life today, partly thanks to her friends who are protecting her from infections by getting all their shots.

Part Three More About Vaccines 27

Riley’s self-portrait

Parent’s Guide to CHILDHOOD IMMUNIZATIONS

However, the benefits of vaccinating your child also extend to other children.

As mentioned earlier, a small percentage of children fail to develop

immunity from vaccines. There are also children who can’t get certain

vaccines for medical or other reasons, and babies who are too young to be

vaccinated. These children rely on the immunity of people around them

to protect them from infectious diseases. The more children in a community

who are vaccinated, the harder it is for a disease to spread.

And finally, getting vaccinated today will help protect future generations

of children.

Smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases the world has ever known,

killing 300 million people in the 20th century alone. But as millions of

children and adults got vaccinated over the years, the disease began to

disappear until finally, in October 1977, only one person on Earth had

smallpox. When he recovered, smallpox was gone, and it will never kill

another baby.

In the United States where disease rates are very low, your child’s risk of

getting one of these diseases may also be very low. Does that mean vaccination

isn’t important? What would happen if everyone stopped getting

vaccinated? We know what would happen because it has happened in

other countries.

Example: In the mid-1970s, about 80% of Japanese children

were vaccinated against pertussis. In 1974, there were only 393

cases of whooping cough in the entire country, and no one died

from it. But then, because of fear about the vaccine’s safety, the

immunization rate dropped to only about 10%. Within 5 years,

the country was in the grip of a whooping cough epidemic that

infected more than 13,000 people and left 41 dead in 1979 alone.

When routine vaccination was resumed, the disease numbers

dropped again.

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Part Three More About Vaccines

Even a few cases of a contagious disease in a vulnerable population could

touch off a major outbreak. This is why we still vaccinate against polio,

even though we haven’t seen it in this country for more than 10 years. One

infected traveler from another country could set us back 50 years if our

own population wasn’t protected.

When you get your child vaccinated, you are not just protecting her. You

are also protecting her friends and schoolmates and their families, and

her children, grandchildren, and future generations.

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od Vaccines

32 Parent’s Guide to CHILDHOOD IMMUNIZATIONS

Part Four Frequently Asked Questions

Part 4: Frequently Asked Questions

How do we know vaccines aren’t causing long-term

health problems?

Observing vaccinated children for many years to look for long-term

health conditions would not be practical, and withholding an effective

vaccine from children while long-term studies are being done wouldn’t be

ethical. A more practical approach is to look at health conditions themselves

and at the factors that cause them. Scientists are already working to

identify risk factors that can lead to conditions like cancer, stroke, heart

disease, and autoimmune diseases such as lupus or rheumatoid arthri

tis. Thousands of studies have already been done looking at hundreds of

potential risk factors. If immunizations were identified as a risk factor in

any of these studies, we would know about it. So far, they have not.

We

learn about a vaccine’s safety during clinical trials before it is licensed,

and monitor it continually as millions of doses are administered after it is

licensed. We also know there is not a plausible biologic reason to believe

vaccines would cause any serious long-term effects. Based on more than

50 years of experience with vaccines, we can say that the likelihood that a

vaccine will cause unanticipated long-term problems is extremely low.

Why do children need so many doses

of certain vaccines?

The reason depends on whether the vaccine is inactivated (killed) or live.

With an inactivated vaccine, each dose contains a fixed amount of disease

antigen (virus or bacteria). Immunity is built in phases, with each dose

boosting immunity to a protective level. Live vaccines are different in that

they contain a small amount of antigen which reproduces and spreads

throughout the body. One dose produces satisfactory immunity in most

children. But a second dose is recommended, because not all children

respond to the first one.

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Parent’s Guide to CHILDHOOD IMMUNIZATIONS

Aren’t some of the ingredients in vaccines toxic?

Some vaccine ingredients could be toxic, but at much higher doses. Any

substance – even water – can be toxic given a large enough dose. But at

a very low dose, even a highly toxic substance can be safe. For example,

many adults have one of the most toxic substances known to humanity,

Botox, injected into their face to reduce wrinkles.

We aren’t always aware of it, but we are exposed to small amounts of these

same “toxic” substances every day:

Mercury: Babies are exposed to mercury in milk, including breast milk.

Seafood also contains mercury.

Formaldehyde: Formaldehyde is in automobile exhaust; in household

products and furnishings such as carpets, upholstery, cosmetics, paint,

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Part Four Frequently Asked Questions

and felt-tip markers; and in health products such as antihistamines,

cough drops, and mouthwash.

Aluminum: The average person takes in an estimated 30 to 50 mg of aluminum

every day, mainly from foods, drinking water, and medicines. Not

all vaccines contain aluminum, but those that do typically contain about

.125 mg to .625 mg per dose, or roughly 1% of that daily average.

Components of vaccines are all there for a reason. Some (like aluminum)

help the vaccine work better. Others (like formaldehyde) were used during

manufacturing and have been removed except for a tiny trace.

One final word – you can’t believe everything you read about harmful

ingredients in vaccines. For example, no vaccine contains, or has ever

contained, even a molecule of antifreeze, although you would never know

that after reading any of a dozen websites claiming that they do.

Can a child get a disease even after being vaccinated?

It isn’t very common, but it can happen. Depending on the vaccine, about

1% to 5% of children who are vaccinated fail to develop immunity. If these

children are exposed to that disease, they could get sick. Sometimes giv

ing an additional vaccine dose will stimulate an immune response in a

child who didn’t respond to 1 dose. For example, a single dose of measles

vaccine protects about 95% of children, but after 2 doses, almost 100% are

immune.

Sometimes

a child is exposed to a disease just prior to being vaccinated,

and gets sick before the vaccine has had time to work. Sometimes a child

gets sick with something that is similar to a disease they have been vacci

nated against. This often happens with flu. Many viruses cause symptoms

that look like flu, and people even call some of them flu, even though

Adverse Event — A medical problem that occurs after a vaccination, which may or may not have been caused by the vaccine.

Adverse Reaction — A medical problem that occurs after a vaccination when it is assumed that the vaccine is the cause.

Antibody — A protein produced by the immune system that helps identify and destroy foreign substances that enter the body.

Antigen — A substance that causes your immune system to produce antibodies against it. A disease germ, generally a bacterium or virus.

Bacteremia — Presence of bacteria in the blood.

Clinical Trials — Testing the safety and effectiveness of vaccines before they are licensed, during which they are given to increasingly larger groups of volunteer subjects.

Communicable Disease — A disease that can spread from one person to another.

Convulsion — See Seizure.

Encephalitis — Inflammation of the brain.

Encephalopathy — An illness affecting the brain.

Epidemic — A large outbreak of disease (see Outbreak). A worldwide

epidemic is called a pandemic.

Exposure — Contact with germs that cause disease. A person must be both exposed and susceptible to a disease to get sick from it.

Febrile Seizure — A seizure caused by a high fever.

Herd Immunity — Protection from disease in a community, due to a large enough proportion of the population having immunity to prevent the disease from spreading from person to person.

Immunity — Protection from disease. Having antibodies to a disease organism usually gives a person immunity.

Glossary

Iron Lung — A cylindrical steel chamber that “breathes” for a person

whose muscles that control breathing have been paralyzed. Some

polio patients have been confined to an iron lung for life.

Local Reaction — A reaction that is confined to a small area of the

body. With vaccines, a local reaction usually refers to redness, sore

ness, or swelling where an injection was given. (A reaction that affects

the body as a whole, such as a fever or bacteremia, is called a “system

ic” reaction.)

Meningitis

— Inflammation of the covering of the brain or spinal

cord.

Outbreak — An unusually large number of cases of a disease occurring

at the same time and place, involving people who got the disease

from the same source or from each other.

Paralysis — Inability to move the muscles. Paralysis usually occurs

in the arms or legs, but any muscle can become paralyzed, including

those that control breathing.

Schedule (or Vaccination Schedule) — The ages and/or intervals at

which vaccines are recommended.

Seizure — A spell during which muscles may jerk uncontrollably,

or a person stares at nothing. Usually a seizure lasts only a brief time

and doesn’t cause permanent harm. A seizure can have many causes,

including epilepsy or other brain disorders, or a high fever (see Febrile

Seizure). Also called convulsion or fit.

Susceptible — Vulnerable to disease. Someone who has never had a

disease or has never been vaccinated against it is susceptible to that

disease. Opposite of immune.

Toxin — Poison.

Vaccine-Preventable Disease — Any disease for which there is a

vaccine.

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Your state health department’s immunization program can answer many questions about immunization in your state. Find your state’s immunization website at

www.immunize.org/states.

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There are man y bo oks and internet sites devoted to vaccination issues. Keep in mind that these reflect a wide range of interpretation of facts, not to mention personal opinions, making it hardfor a parent to know what to believe. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when evaluating a vaccination-related book or website:

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LEARN MORE

CDC Websites:

General vaccine information: www.cdc.gov/vaccines

Information about hepatitis: www.cdc.gov/hepatitis

Information about flu: www.cdc.gov/flu

International travel information:

wwwn.cdc.gov/travel

Information about vaccine safety:

www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety

•

•

CDC-INFO. Live professionals are available 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., Monday through Friday to answer your questions. Call800-232-4636 (800-CDC-INFO).

What

are the author’s credentials? How well does he or she know the subject?

Does the author cite his or her sources? Are the sources reputable?

Does information from other sources appear to be edited or taken out of context? Are you directed to the original source?

Is personal opinion presented as fact?

What are the author’s apparent motives?

Is the author’s tone reasonable? Does the language seem objective, or overly biased o r manipulative?

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